Stretching spider silk to its high-tech limits

The marvellous stuff that spiders and silkworms make has a big future in technologies from artificial corneas to brain implants

Video: Watch skin made of spider silk stop a bullet

By Jessica Griggs

Chris Holland kicks a bucket of rotten fruit. “It smells like death in here,” he says cheerfully as a cloud of tiny fruit flies swarms up to its fate. We’re inside a glasshouse that would have any arachnophobe quaking. As many as 100 giant spiders are hanging from the ceiling, lurking on branches and lolling about on enormous webs. With their legs outstretched, they are the size of an adult’s palm, their bodies the size of your thumb. Littering the webs are remnants of larger meals – the sucked-out husks of bluebottles.

The spiders are golden orb weavers and their bright yellow webs are some of the largest and most impressive of any arachnid. For researchers who study silk, like Holland at the University of Oxford, orb weavers are ideal because of their large webs and the fact that they are easy to handle. “They make great experimental subjects,” says Fritz Vollrath, who heads the Oxford group.

Weight for weight, a typical spider silk is 20 times as strong as steel and four times as tough as Kevlar. It is also extremely flexible, stretching up to 50 per cent of its length without breaking. And it’s not just the silk’s physical properties that are impressive. It elicits no immune reaction in our bodies, it is biodegradable, and it is produced at low temperatures and pressures relative to other polymers. This is surely the kind of material that all of us, and not just our favourite fictional superheroes, could put to good use.

The reason we don’t is that spider silk ...

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